Phil/Psych 447

Seminar in Cognitive Science

Week 6: Chance and Genius

Boden Chapter 9

Discussion Questions

1. What did you find confusing or hard to understand in this chapter?
2. What are the relations among chance, chaos, randomness, and unpredictability?
3. Can chance be explanatory?
4. Why don't people like chance as an explanation?
5. Why does chance require judgment to constitute produce creativity?
6. What kinds of chance contribute most to creative breakthroughs?
7. Which is more subject to chance: art or science?
8. Can people who want to be more creativity make themselves luckier?

Distinctions

• Chaos (not disorder): unpredictability because of sensitivity to initial conditions.
• Coincidence: co-occurrence of events with independent causal histories.
• Randomness (absolute): total absence of order or structure.
• Randomness (explanatory): total lack of causal explanation.
• Randomness (relative): lack of order relevant to some specific consideration.
• Serendipity: finding something valuable without its being specifically sought.
• Unpredictable (absolute): unforeseeable in principle because subject to no laws.
• Unpredictable (relative): unpredictable in practice because of human/computational limitations.
• Unpredictable (butterfly): unpredictablee because of chaos.

Boden Chapter 10

Discussion Questions

1. What did you find confusing or hard to understand in this chapter?
2. What geniuses have you encountered?
3. What made them geniuses?
4. Can introspection and first-person reports tell us much about creativity?
5. Can ordinary people be creative?
6. Can creativity be oppressed?
7. Do geniuses such as Mozart, Einstein, Edison, and van Gogh have anything in common?
8. How do emotions contribute to genius?

Phil/Psych 447

Paul Thagard

Computational Epistemology Laboratory.

This page updated Oct. 19, 2009